Koichi Aoki -- Kojima Gayoi no Yuubinsen（小島通いの郵便船）

 

Back when I was spending the summer of 1972 at my grandparents' house in Wakayama Prefecture, I remember a delivery guy who brought over glass bottles of coffee milk. I'm not sure whether this was a daily tradition but that coffee milk sure was tasty. So tasty that I managed to drop one on the ground and break it open in my haste to get it. Nothing like sealing the deal on impressions to everyone in the neighbourhood by being butterfingers.

I was kinda reminded of that incident while listening to this old-timey kayo kyoku by Koichi Aoki（青木光一）. "Kojima Gayoi no Yuubinsen" (Mail Boat Through the Islands) was a March 1955 single written by Miyoshi Kamio（上尾美代志）and composed by Hideo Hirakawa（平川英夫）. A quaint melody and story which relates the feelings of sending letters and waiting for responses via the slower delivery system way back then, the arrangement and Aoki's tender vocals did give me the feelings of how much more precious the postal system was in the old days especially in remote communities on the smaller islands in comparison to the almost immediate replies of texting and email are now in the 21st century.